Originally built in 1901 by the Furniture City Electric Company of Grand Rapids for the Père Marquette Railway, this building began as an electric lighting plant that generated power to illuminate the newly expanded Ottawa Beach Hotel, using a hand-fed, coal-fired boiler supplied with water from Black Lake to produce steam that drove an engine spinning two dynamos. Cottagers could also purchase electricity, while hotel water came from a separate reservoir atop Mt. Pisgah supplied by a small pump house, and cottage water came from private wells pumped by windmills or gasoline engines. Even after the Muskegon Power Company brought electricity to Ottawa Beach in 1915, the hotel continued generating its own power here and added water pumps to expand its water system. After the hotel burned in 1923, the building was used to provide water for cottages from wells using pumps and a large water storage tank installed inside, and it became known as the Pump House, a name that endured as the Ottawa Beach Water Authority later continued water service from the building. Its service ended in 1988 when Holland municipal water reached Ottawa Beach, after which preservation and restoration work followed, with Ottawa County Parks serving as steward since 2005 and the building planned as the future home of the Pump House Museum and Learning Center to be operated by the Historic Ottawa Beach Society.